Product of Industry

Like Todd Terje, Mark Evetts rode into the spotlight in the mid-2000s on the strength of his bedroom edits. Product of Industry is a concept album of sorts that conveys the dark side of industrialization: boredom, hopelessness, depression, and pollution all find a musical corollary here.

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Like Todd Terje, Mark Evetts rode into the spotlight in the mid-2000s on the strength of his bedroom edits. His re-works of disco and forgotten R&B album cuts (see the Damita Jo-era Janet Jackson remix “RnB Drunkie”, which became enough of a hit to demand several re-pressings) gained him enough traction to found his own label, MERC. Sparkling tracks like his slow-burning workout of Womack & Womack’s “Baby I’m Scared of You”, and a fabulous, freewheeling Labelle re-edit he called "Sunshadow” were eventually compiled on Mark E Works 2005 -2009 Selected Tracks & Edits.

Evetts’ attitude towards edits has always been fairly utilitarian, so it’s no surprise that his interests have slowly shifted to original composition. Stone Breaker, his 2011 debut for Spectral Sound, was a satisfying sampler of woozy house; its monumental centerpiece, “Got to Get Me There”, proved as blissfully meandering as the best of his early work. Product of Industry is initially a less inviting record—though it incorporates some of the same tightly-wound, slowly morphing loops found in his re-works, it has its share of methodical, energy-sapping tracks. Taken as a larger statement, it paints Evetts as an artist who’s grown increasingly insular over the course of his career.

Evetts is a native of Wolverhampton and has lived in the larger English industrial center of Birmingham since 1995. Product of Industry could properly be called a “concept album,” but that concept is fairly nebulous, really more of a shifting mood bolstered by a set of musical connotations. Tracks like “Persia” and the perplexingly heavy-footed “Eganix” plod along with the dull robotic energy of machinery operators, their thick, leaden drums sounding like clanging pipes, or feet treading on sawdust.

The album tries to convey the dark side of industrialization: boredom, hopelessness, depression, and pollution all find a musical corollary at some point. Evetts often tweaks and re-tweaks interlocking parts until a given track stretches well past the seven minute mark; the album is over an hour long, but in the midst of that monotony, there are moments of specific intimacy. “Smoke”, with its impossibly deep voice growling "Yea…uh huh,” seems to mimic the minute, enveloping distraction of a cigarette, eventually adding a hint anxiety before finally petering out. Back to reality, then.

“Bog Dance”, one of the most aggressive cuts, is also among the most entrancing, as a series of chain-link synthesizer lines whirr upwards to towering heights. It highlights Evetts' feel for structure with interlocking parts that escalate in urgency even as they continually return to the same ground, following the same tension-and-release patterns he once sutured into otherwise affable disco tracks. But despite Evetts’ abundance of ideas, there are stretches that feel like dead air. “Being Hiding”, featuring a vocal by Bing Ji Ling of the Phenomenal Handclap Band, comes off as a too-literal singer/songwriter take on the album’s underlying ideas, overburdened with lines like “Every day there’s a 9 to 5/ Yet we still don’t know just when it ends.”

Evetts is an old hand at house music’s relentless 4/4 beat, ambient washes, and slightly dissonant chords. When these details spool out at a methodical rate, they create a unique feeling somewhere between melancholy and slightly buzzed euphoria, the best example being the remarkable nine-minute closing track, “Leaving Osaka”. You could interpret Product of Industry’s sometimes severe tone an expression of the real world's slow encroachment onto the dance floor, but “Leaving Osaka” makes it sound like a further displacement of reality, as if enduring the tedium opens the door to some weird new bliss.